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Beyond Google: Social Media Engines First, Other Search Engines Second

I’ve never encouraged a "Google First" or "Google Only" mentality for search
marketers to follow. This is where you focus only on Google, figuring the other
major search engines don’t matter. Instead, I’ve said that all the search
engines are important traffic channels to pursue. Don’t forget the search
engines beyond Google! But over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself more and
more thinking that if you want to go beyond Google as a search marketer, the
other search engines that matter first are the "social media search engines."
After them come the other major general purpose search engines like Yahoo,
Microsoft and Ask.

Yesterday’s post from Michael
Arrington on TechCrunch traffic sources
really drove it home for me. Google’s organic traffic — search driven traffic
– is his top source. After that, it’s not Yahoo or Microsoft or Ask sending
visitors. No, the leading sources are from social media search engines likeDigg,
StumbleUpon and Reddit. Heck, evenTechmeme out distances the major general
purpose search engines (my recentQ&A With Gabe Rivera,
Creator Of Techmeme article covers Techmeme more). Yahoo does show up in
10th place, but that’s for My Yahoo feed-driven traffic, not search traffic.

Why’s TechCrunch doing so well on Google and not the other major search
engines? It could be that TechCrunch is optimized best for Google and missing
out on the other major search players. But c’mon. Search marketers know that the
major search engines don’t have that many differences in how they rank pages.
Yes, maybe if you load your URLs up with keywords you might do a bit better at
Microsoft Live.com. Perhaps if you do paid inclusion, you might see more traffic
flowing from Yahoo. But a page that does well with Google generally should have
as good of chance as doing well with the others.

Another caveat is that TechCrunch is probably getting Google News and Google
Blog Search traffic mixed in with the overall "organic" figures (seethis recent stats
post I did about Search Engine Land traffic sources to understand this more).
Sure, including those sources as part of Google searches overall could help make
Google seem an even bigger resource. But the reality is that many sites
constantly report that Google is by far search traffic leader.

That brings me back to the other major search engines aspect. Over the years,
I’d say don’t ignore them — don’t build just for Google. But that really meant
to build good pages that should please all the major search engines at once. Do
this, and maybe you don’t do well across the board. But you might get a good
"portfolio" of search terms where you rank well in one place for a search while
a different term at another place sends you traffic.

Not everyone likes that advice. Some want across the board rankings for all
search engines, so they go the route of setting up custom pages for each search
engine, maybe new domains and so on. I’ve always felt that was overkill. But
even more now, I think search marketers need to go the social media optimization
route first, then consider how to do better on the other major search engines if
they aren’t ranking there.

Social media optimization? That’s the term
coined (to my knowledge) by Rohit Bhargavat last year to describe tapping
into the various social media search engines that are out there.

Social media search engines? I’ve struggled with this, since I haven’t really
considered Digg, Reddit, Netscape and
gang as search engines.

To me, search engines are places where people search, they express an active
desire, usually through a keyword search. People don’t go to Digg because
they’re looking for something. Instead, they want to discover things, to see
what’s new, be entertained. That’s not search.

Well, it might not be search, but it’s a kissing cousin, closely related.Google News isn’t necessarily search. Yes,
you can keyword search there. But you can also browse. And that browsing
behavior is a search. It’s an alternative to typing in "what’s new today in
news." So in thinking about this recently, I’ve shifted over more strongly into
viewing discovery as a search behavior, seeing the social media outlets as
social media search engines.

Search marketers should tap into search engines — and that includes the
social media search engines. Neil Patel’sForget ABCs – The Social
Media Alphabet Is DNRS from Search Engine Land yesterday is an excellent
introduction to some of these players, for those not up on social media search
engines and social media optimization. We’re going to continue doing articles
like these and looks at social media players because they crucial and deserve
the attention.

The social media engines smaller vertical search engines that search
marketers can think "oh, I’m not up on Digg. I might look into it later."
Instead, they’re rapidly becoming major search engines you need to think of
before those of the traditional players. They are traffic powerhouses you can’t
ignore.

In addition, tapping into these players helps you indirectly. Even if you
don’t linkbait to
get on them, that they may help bring in some of the trusted links that Eric
Ward’s Are You In The
Circle Of Link Trust? column at Search Engine Land talked about yesterday.

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“But a page that does well with Google generally should have as good of chance as doing well with the others.”

That’s an oversimplification, in my opinion. Each major search engine hangs its hat on a different algorithm. All the algorithms are looking for a combination of relevance, trust, and community value. But they don’t share the same databases or criteria.

I would expect no more than, say, 25-35% general agreement between the four majors on top results for a random sampling of queries.

But ranking differences aside, each engine has a core audience that is drawn toward different interests. They can all share search spikes driven by news and celebrity sensations, but their core audiences are more interested in other things.

http://www.tallstreet.com/ tallstreet

social news sites are good sources of traffic, but they arn’t really search engines.

there are social search engines, that is sites that act like search engines but where people rank the results (as opposed to infering the results from an algorithm) [like ours]

they do have several advantages when it comes to answering subjective queries, e.g. what is the best blog.

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/ Matt McGee

Danny – I think it’s too much of a generalization to say social media optimization is more important than Yahoo, Live.com, etc. For some sites/businesses, sure. But not for everyone. Not across the board.

Search marketing, like any form of marketing, is about getting seen and heard by your target audience. And if they’re not using the Diggs of the world, putting those sites ahead of Yahoo and Live.com would be a big mistake.

http://www.fairfax.com.au/map.ac shor

SMO, SEM, SEO, TLA meh!

If your job is to optimize websites for traffic, Follow The Traffic, be it search engines or social media communities or affiliate marketing. Once that is clarified, it is simple to prioritize optimization. The problem is ensuring you have targeted the correct traffic drivers, as it might be great to rank #1 on Live.com but what if you could rank #20 on Google and receive twice as much traffic? This is where some sneaky tactics like obtaining a Hitwise report on a competitor’s clickstream or plying a knowledgeable industry expert with alcohol can help :)

For now, if you are a blogger or a news site, social media networks are important drivers of traffic. The sad truth is web-savvy searchers avoid Live and Yahoo like the plague as we’ve been weaned on Google. It hardly surprises that within our search/smo glasshouse that G & DRNS (thanks Neil!) will overshadow YMA referrals.

http://www.daviddalka.com/createvalue David Dalka

For Techcrunch’s audience, I’d agree totally. I’m not sure this would be true for an online retailer or a site with a different purpose than covering web 2.0.

http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com Carrie Hill

Hi Danny,
Our company does tend to lean towards ranking well in google and then waiting for Yahoo & MSN to catch up. The simple truth is that’s the safe & conservative way to go. We could mix it up and optimize some pages for Yahoo, some for MSN & Some for Google – but honestly in travel & hospitality – Google is king. We see great revenue and results from both Google & Google images – AND – we’re safe in not annoying Google with techniques that might work in Yahoo & MSN.

We are on the edge of the social media optimization – not QUITE there yet – but getting there. Because our company is large – it takes time to get things done (frustrating but necessary.) Posts like this add ammo to my posiiton as a research & development manager and I REALLY appreciate it!

Thanks for all you do…..
~Carrie

tish grier

Sites like Digg, Reddit, etc. have limited categories that narrow search to what’s happy for the tech crowd–so the sites do very little for what’s *not* tech. Have you ever tried to enter something into any of those sites that isn’t tech related? Even once you do, the chances are your entry will either founder or gain a very nasty comment from some anonymous nerd. Yeah, I need that garbage like I need a migraine.

http://www.ciceron.com AEklund

Sometimes I get concerned when the most wired, most connected, most linked to pundits, most widely distributed technorati’s generalize about how search has work for them, rather than how search may work for others. Danny Sullivan is perhaps one of the most respected, most widely cited people in all of search. It’s no wonder that his site traffic would be heavily impacted by social media sites, etc. but for the masses of others, this is most likely not the case.

I wish Danny would make a further post on this topic to either rebut my and other’s positions or make another case on the matter. I for one am not sold quite yet.

http://searchengineland.com Danny Sullivan

I don’t know (and don’t mean to imply) that because they help us, they’ll necessarily help others. You cannot draw any conclusions from just one site. But neither am I doing that. Lots of sites are discovering that social media search engines can drive traffic — sites of all types.

Given their rise, I think it’s well worth any site investing some time to explore them more — hence this post.

It takes a few seconds to submit to StumbleUpon or some of these other sites. If you want to be sold, well — try it!